An activity that displays an expandable list of items by binding to a data source implementing the ExpandableListAdapter, and exposes event handlers when the user selects an item.

ExpandableListActivity hosts a ExpandableListView object that can be bound to different data sources that provide a two-levels of data (the top-level is group, and below each group are children). Binding, screen layout, and row layout are discussed in the following sections.

Screen Layout

ExpandableListActivity has a default layout that consists of a single, full-screen, centered expandable list. However, if you desire, you can customize the screen layout by setting your own view layout with setContentView() in onCreate(). To do this, your own view MUST contain an ExpandableListView object with the id "@android:id/list" (or list if it's in code)

Optionally, your custom view can contain another view object of any type to display when the list view is empty. This "empty list" notifier must have an id "android:empty". Note that when an empty view is present, the expandable list view will be hidden when there is no data to display.

The following code demonstrates an (ugly) custom screen layout. It has a list with a green background, and an alternate red "no data" message.

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <LinearLayout
         android:orientation="vertical"
         android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
         android:layout_height="fill_parent"
         android:paddingLeft="8"
         android:paddingRight="8">
 
     <ExpandableListView id="android:list"
               android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
               android:layout_height="fill_parent"
               android:background="#00FF00"
               android:layout_weight="1"
               android:drawSelectorOnTop="false"/>
 
     <TextView id="android:empty"
               android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
               android:layout_height="fill_parent"
               android:background="#FF0000"
               android:text="No data"/>
 </LinearLayout>
 

Row Layout

With these, you can specify the layout of individual rows for groups and children in the list. These constructor takes a few parameters that specify layout resources for groups and children. It also has additional parameters that let you specify which data field to associate with which object in the row layout resource. The SimpleCursorTreeAdapter fetches data from Cursors and the SimpleExpandableListAdapter fetches data from EventLog.Lists of Maps.

Android provides some standard row layout resources. These are in the R.layout class, and have names such as simple_list_item_1, simple_list_item_2, and two_line_list_item. The following layout XML is the source for the resource two_line_list_item, which displays two data fields,one above the other, for each list row.

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
 <LinearLayout
     android:layout_width="fill_parent"
     android:layout_height="wrap_content"
     android:orientation="vertical">
 
     <TextView id="text1"
         android:textSize="16"
         android:textStyle="bold"
         android:layout_width="fill_parent"
         android:layout_height="wrap_content"/>
 
     <TextView id="text2"
         android:textSize="16"
         android:layout_width="fill_parent"
         android:layout_height="wrap_content"/>
 </LinearLayout>
 

You must identify the data bound to each TextView object in this layout. The syntax for this is discussed in the next section.

Binding to Data

You bind the ExpandableListActivity's ExpandableListView object to data using a class that implements the ExpandableListAdapter interface. Android provides two standard list adapters: SimpleExpandableListAdapter for static data (Maps), and SimpleCursorTreeAdapter for Cursor query results.

Constants inherited from class android.app.Activity

Constants inherited from class android.content.Context

Public Constructors

Public Methods

Protected Methods

Methods inherited from class android.app.Activity